I have broad interests and experience as a journalist, covering the auto business, the consumer-packaged goods industry, entrepreneurship, and others, as well as politics, culture, media and religion. I used to cover the car business for The Wall Street Journal, which nominated me and some colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize for our coverage of General Motors. I've also covered autos for Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com, Automotive News and Advertising Age. I am a major contributor to Chief Executive Magazine, Brandchannel.com, Townhall Magazine, New Nutrition Business magazine and the Journal, among other outlets. I hope that having lived around Flyover Country for most of my life gives me a grounded perspective.

Sports Illustrated Clotheslines God, Christians and Football

Mark Oppenheimer may be a champion debater from his days at Yale. But he and Sports Illustrated did a great disservice to polemics with their cover story leading up to the Big Game last week, “Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?”

First off, Oppenheimer’s story didn’t much address the question teased in the cover tag; the inside headline, “In the Fields of the Lord,” is a better indication of what the story — really, an essay — was actually about. But that’s a forgivable journalistic convention. Bait-and-switch also occurs at car dealerships and rug stores.

Harder to forgive is the swipe they took at Christian athletes, the National Football League and the sport of football in general. Under the guise of a balanced look at the increasingly consequential intersection between football and Christianity, they tilted heavily against all three objects of their examination.

It’s au courant to challenge the very continuation of football, the real America’s Pastime. Now, an incipient media meme — not yet common in Sports Illustrated, at least — depicts football fans like ancient Romans, turning our thumbs down on our logo-splattered sacrificial gladiators, unable to keep our blood lust from consuming our compassion and good sense.

Essentially, Oppenheimer argued that growing concerns about the level of serious injury in the NFL undermine the profession of faith by Christians in the sport, because it can’t be “Christian” to play such a violent game.

“Some Christian athletes and coaches are starting to recognize that football, at least as it is currently played, may be bad for one’s soul,” wrote the blogger and religion opiner for the New York Times, Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation and other leftist publications. Oppenheimer hyperbolically asserted that “the culture of football might … be unmaking Christians.”

Make no mistake: Football is violent. But that has always been clear to any young man at the high-school level or above who has strapped on a helmet in hopes of gridiron glory – and to his parents. And last time anyone checked, playing football is voluntary.

Also, the powers that be in the NFL continue to enact tougher rules that already have reduced the overall level of violence in the game by helping protect players in the most vulnerable positions from the most debilitating injuries, especially brain damage. The league must balance this imperative with the fact that bone-jarring hits are one of the game’s biggest attractions for many fans.

Christian convictions also help many players try to play within the rules, while at the same time they attempt to honor God by playing hard and committing their efforts to the job they’re getting paid to do.

And while Oppenheimer stated flatly that Jesus abhorred violence, such an obvious truth probably didn’t occur to the moneychangers in the temple. What Jesus abhorred was violence or any other evil in the service of exploitation and oppression.

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